Delivery of physical documents remains a vital service for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that many people do not have computers.
So why should people with computers subsidize people without computers? Or, if we do, wouldn't it be easier to just buy them an Obamaphone, or a cheap computer? If they need to print, can't they do it somewhere like Kinko's or a library? (I seldom need to print anything.)
Admit it, delivery of physical pieces of paper - who usually have no particular worth - burns a lot of fuel, and requires a lot of human labor. It just doesn't make sense today. But if you live somewhere far, far away - so far that even the satellite Internet is not an option - then perhaps you need to sign up for USPS delivery, and pay for it as you pay for any other service. USPS will print your email, securely, put it in an envelope, and will deliver that envelope to you. Will that make the recipient happy?
Not everyone has a computer or can afford an internet connection nor should they be expected to do so. Perhaps many years down the line electronic delivery of documents will become ubiquitous and computers will become sufficiently cheap but that time will probably require another generation or two to die off before it happens.
What year have you arrived from, 1910? A computer today can be purchased under $100 - this is less than I usually leave in a single grocery store. How much lower do you want the price to go? If you cannot afford the free WiFi connection in your city, there are free hotspots. I do not advocate cell phone connections, they are overpriced; I don't have one myself. But a generic Internet link can be had for very little - and it can be shared among tens of families, if they are so poor. Just tell them the WiFi password, or run it open. Is $2-3/mo too much?
There is absolutely no reason why access to a computer cannot be expected. Car ownership is often expected - and that is far harder to accomplish. Anyone can own, or share, a computer. Anyone can own a free email address. It cannot possibly hurt anyone to check his email once a week. Paper mail, like horses, and like open fire, and like hunting for food, should be left to special cases - to enthusiasts, or to professionals, or to businesses that need the paper and that are willing to pay for it. A common man has no use of that paper, and it ends up in trash. Why are we, as a society, so enthusiastic about mail? It is insecure, it is unreliable, and it is slow.
CEOs don't have to live in China. Besides, San Jose looks like a medieval village, compared to Shanghai.
Just look at how businesses haven't fled California!
Hmm... I'm here, and I know examples to the contrary. New businesses are not hiring.
Your second option would get the 1% beheaded, just like in France. As it should be.
Perhaps. As I said, it's a risky proposition. But if you don't accept any of those two plans, what do you propose? As it stands, most of US goods cannot be sold on the international market (they aren't even produced.) This is not a sustainable situation. Feds are printing money like crazy, but that cannot continue forever. What is your prognosis for, say, next 10 years?
Don't be surprised when the serfs storm the castle one day. The behavior is abusive and will only be tolerated so long and to a limited degree. Note that storming the castle could mean forcing employment laws similar to France.
This will simply result in no new hiring in the USA. Companies are already overtaxed; right now they are additionally struck with healthcare requirements. Any employer of sufficient size will do well - from his business' point of view - if he just moves the whole company to China. Or, if he can't, he will automate his process as much as possible and outsource all the rest. In the end, you cannot make a law that requires companies to stay in business.
The US worker is already extremely expensive on the global pay scale. If you make him even more expensive, fewer of them will be hired. If you want to compete with China and bring industries back, you have to either set up prohibitive tariffs, so that Chinese goods are as expensive here as domestic ones, or to drop the minimum salary to Chinese levels, along with OSHA and EPA and many other things. For the first one the USA will be ejected from WTO; besides, US goods, still expensive, won't be competitive on the world market. The second option has no such drawbacks, but it's very dangerous and hard to do correctly. Those incompetents can't even handle healthcare; here we are talking about fundamentally realigning the USA to fit into the new, global system of manufacturing.
The best way for employers here to avoid that is to demonstrate that it isn't necessary.
Iti s not necessary, but at the same time employers feel no pressure whatsoever to change their hiring methods. They already can assign negative weight to women because women are more likely to need personal time. But you cannot ever prove that. Today they don't even say why someone is rejected, to minimize the liability.
The behavior of feudal lords and HR people is caused by the same reason: mistrust. And they are not entirely wrong here. Many people - just as you are saying - are good, honest workers who always separate their work and their free time. But "many" is not a specific number. IMO, not more than 25% of all workers are inclined to maintain such separation. Some of them do not want; some cannot; some do not care; some are interested to work as little as possible. The majority of workers allow some leakage of their off the clock habits into their on the clock activities. Employers do not object to some of that, but abuse of trust is not a well defined line in the sand. Given the choice, HR picks employees who are less likely to become a liability. You can claim all you want that on weekends you are a completely different person than on weekdays, but nobody is going to spend time on evaluating your statements - unless you are a unique employee who has unique skills. Many programmers are like that, but very few accountants or pizza delivery people are.
Besides, as I said in my example, if you are doing your daredevil stunts on weekends, it does not matter how honest you are if you are in a hospital with 123 broken bones, unable to complete that complex project where you are the leader. The same will happen if you get arrested, or lost in the woods, or sick - those are objective factors that do not depend on your intent. I knew people who got injured in a game of hockey and had to spend some days away from work. You would say that this is normal behavior and normal accidents that all people have from time to time, and that is true. However this does not prevent HR from selecting only those applicants who present below the average risk. After all, this is the primary function of HR - to evaluate applicants and to select only those who are the best for the company. This does lead to rejection of normal behavior; but what can anyone do about that?
I'd like to hear what the reasons are for those that agree with using social networks and information found on the internet when hiring. I might be wrong or missing something.
You would be perfectly correct if a human can wear one mind at work, and then wear another mind after work.
But humans are not robots, and it doesn't work this way. If you possess a characteristic away from work, you will have some of it at work, or close enough to work that it matters. HR will decide on their own if those characteristics are a concern or not. If you are engaged in risky entertainment, for example, you are a risk to the company at least because you can be injured or killed - and who will be doing your work then? There are several things that , combined, form the "company culture" - and if you do not fit that culture, too bad. For example, a company who employs primarily religious people (I worked for one, briefly) will not want to hire a militant atheist. There is simply no reason to take chances when so many people are out of work. Exceptions may be made only for employees who are special in what they do.
But the risk of battery puncture and fire doesn't get worse as the Tesla ages
Why do you think so? LI-Ion batteries experience significant mechanical deformation as they are charged/discharged. There is a lot of vibration that is transferred into the battery from the road. Old batteries require longer charging, at higher temperatures. The numbers will not be the same.
There is yet another issue. Batteries are essentially strips of plastic tape that have goo smeared onto them, and then the strips are rolled up to form an element. There is not much accuracy in this process, and not much repeatability. Some batteries may serve longer than expected, and some may fail prematurely. Some failures can cause fires. A gas tank is a precision instrument, compared to a battery. It can be inspected for leaks, but a battery cannot be inspected in a similar way - there are too many sealed elements, and each of them is manufactured by the lowest bidder. We haven't seen yet battery fires in Teslas that are caused by an intact battery. But as more cars are put onto the road, and as they accumulate more miles, this may become an issue.
A Yagi will not work inside of a waveguide for a million reasons, starting with the fact that there is no flat wavefront to speak of. Yagi antenna works on the principle that individual elements are hit with the flat wave at a slightly different time, which translates to a phase shift at a given frequency. If you build the antenna just right, these phase shifts are mutually neutralized, but only if the wave comes from there, and on a certain the frequency. Then the signals from multiple elements can be combined (Yagi does that in space; phased arrays do it primarily in hardware) and you get higher gain.
A wave in the waveguide is very well defined by known boundary conditions; this allows you to design transitions that do exactly what you need - they can be probes, loops, or whatever the design requires.
What you are looking at in the picture is the waveguide they used to test it. The antenna itself is inside the waveguide
The antenna, in this case, is the open end of the waveguide that interfaces with the external EM field. For example, a horn can have a larger aperture, but at the end of it there is only a small probe. It would be incorrect to call the probe "the antenna."
Or you can say it in a different way. An antenna here is anything that cannot be thrown out without hurting the performance. For example, the stack of books that the antenna sits on is not an antenna. A dish in the DirectTV antenna is part of the antenna because the thing won't work without it.
The laws of physics that determine how much energy you can capture from the spherical wavefront are very well known. (At that level it's pure geometry.) The OP is correct: there is only that much energy going through that given surface. You cannot recover more.
A common man who cares about being able to remember an inkblot later on would describe it with specifics, like "five blue on top and three blue on bottom." This is quite parseable by a computer. The associative descriptions that the authors are hoping for are just not going to happen. Never. An association is a fleeting thing, especially when you are dealing with a random inkblot.
Far more importantly, the inconvenience of matching those images will be so great that the web sites will lose audience, and the site owner will drop this stupidity.
Most importantly, the method does not protect the customer - it only protects the web site owner. (A hacker can always figure out, with patience and time, which description fits what inkblot.) This means that millions of customers will be forced to endure this torture just for convenience of the site operator. This isn't going to fare well.
I dare them to find enough commercial web sites who are willing to show such a finger to their paying audience. They would be far better off generating realistic "oil on canvas" images in impressionist style.
It's the design and quality of assembly that are being compared here. Most cars move front end forward, and the gas tank is the last part that gets affected (and if it does, the impact was too strong.) Tesla's batteries are located closer to the middle of the car, and much closer to the road, so they are less protected - despite the steel box around them. Is that enough? Maybe; or maybe not. Losing a $60-80K car in a fire just because you ran over a brick on the road is not a very pleasant proposition even if you are a millionaire. Standard (ICE) cars will not be totaled from that; you may need to tow the car and replace a few lids and covers, but after that the car would be driveable.
The comparison would be valid only among the new cars (< 1 year.) Old cars have different problems, and Tesla model S is not yet old enough for comparison (we don't know how safe it is after 3, 5 and 10 years on the road.)
MS DOS + Norton Commander = a solution that was faster than most modern file managers.
Windows 95 was inferior to most of its contemporaries (e.g., OS 2)
OS/2 was just a bad product. I used it. Perhaps the kernel had its positive sides, being true 32-bit and all, but overall the OS was nearly unusable. Start with selection of ugliest fonts on the planet, then move to the selection of ugly widgets, then address the programming model... there was hardly anything inspiring in the OS/2. Windows was far lighter - and though it crashed a lot until NT, it was faster when it worked.
Bob has 5 apples. Bob eats 2 apples and loses 1. How many apples does he have left?
Presuming there is only one Bob, at least two.
Assuming that the list of operations that were performed upon his set of apples is completely listed. But we do not know that. Bob could have eaten two apples, lost one, and in addition have one apple stolen from him - or three more added by his loving grandmother who notices that Bob is running low.
This is why such questions are so hard for math-oriented people. They instantly see loose ends and loopholes.
This is exactly true. A logically and mathematically oriented mind will come up with correct answers that are not in the list, only because the author of the test intended it for simpler minds, those who readily discard less obvious factors - like the cup itself.
They go on tangent because the question masquerades as a valid, mathematically correct system of equations - which already confuses anyone who heard about such things because those equations are not true. Whereas in reality the question has nothing to do with math, and can be just as easily asked with flowers or animals.
Perhaps this example would be more convincing if it's not your brother who is sick, but a random person from another city who you do not know, and who does not know you, nor cares about you.
Will you gracefully accept a stranger for 6 months and pay for all his needs? Will you not ask for compensation from that stranger? Even if you do it once, what if after this one checks out another one is already ringing your doorbell, for another 6 months of stay? How soon will you give up?
Obamacare requires you to pay for other people who you do not know, regardless of your own desires. Are you a free man after that? Is this the land of the free, or it's a slave ranch where every slave must obey the master?
Your example of compassion is expandable to private insurances - which is financing of other people's needs. You used to be able to buy any coverage that you need, or none. Now you must choose from three preset levels, none of which are very interesting. What advantage can you have from having a bureaucrat assemble a healthcare plan for you? Do they know your needs better than you do?
A private insurance is the same well known managed fund; everyone contributes, and everyone may draw upon it as needed. It used to be your choice what plan to join - and that would be indicative of the group of people that you choose to join. The plan for heavy smokers will be more expensive than for nonsmokers - but it's fair because smokers are more likely to need treatment. I do not smoke; why should I pay for someone else's vices? I may be willing to share the risk with people just like myself. That would be fair enough. The new plans make such separation impossible. People with healthy habits are expected to pay for treatment of people with bad habits. Where is my freedom of association?
For example, an accountant may earn 120 roubles per month. Rent would be 30 roubles, food would be 60 roubles, and family would consume 30 roubles. How soon will such a person be able to afford a car (6,000 roubles) ?
In USSR people were paid only the bare minimum to rent a room or a whole apartment from the government; to buy basic food in government-owned stores, and sometimes a TV (300 roubles) or a radio receiver (100 roubles) from the same store. They were not expected to have any excess money; many had to borrow several days before the payday. It took decades to outfit an apartment, assuming honest work.
People in USSR were nothing but slaves; however the government permitted them to pick and choose what they do, as long as they work somewhere (not working was a crime.) The government did not care where they live, and how many people (none or one) can fit into their kitchen. Slaves were permitted to play around with those trifles. A whole workday of a scientist was valued in 7 roubles - enough to buy a couple of bags of raw potatoes, or twice as much as cost of eating at a diner. Slaves were provided with transportation that was nearly free (0.05 rouble per ride) - but it was very uncomfortable. Taxicabs were available, sometimes, starting from 10 roubles.
This paints a picture of a very poor society. This is because the government retained nearly all the profit from the labor of those people. Some work was poorly organized and not efficient, but still people worked practically for free - because it was the only game in town, and you could not refuse to participate. The rest of the monies was spent on stupid things, like helping select African regimes. Millions of tons of trucks, weapons and fuel were readily sent to any tinpot dictator who declares himself a socialist (of convenience.) A lot of money was spent on weapons, and on spaceflight, and on personal enrichment of party leaders.
What was not spent money on? Housing, and healthcare. Those were two lagging areas of social development. People in 1980s still lived in homes built in 1880s - and those were not Czar's palaces either. Those houses were nearly impossible to live in, everything was worn down so much in them that many did not even have central hot water pipes connected; crude point of use water heaters were employed instead. Any living accomodations were hard to get. The Party simply did not care that the people live in squalor, like five people in one tiny room. (The bathroom was shared, of course, between all the inhabitants of an apartment when it is divided up this way. And the telephone.)
Healthcare was similarly rationed. Shortage of doctors was a permanent state of affairs. Doctors were paid very little, and in return they were often angry and hating the patient even before he walks in. The equipment that they used was from 1950s and 1960s. Dental fillings were done without anaesthetic, without suction, without a nurse, and using an old, belt-driven dental drill. No X-rays either. There are many horror stories on the Internet that explain how the whole torture was set up. Imported, modern dental drills, and anaesthetics, and nurses, and X-rays, and the latest materials - that was available only to patients at the Kremlin Hospital and a few top notch, closed hospitals that only serviced party bosses. Everyone else had to suffer without anaesthetic. Naturally, the "free" did not involve a dental hygienist - there was no such job, and nobody even knew that you need to see one a couple times per year. Slaves did not require good medicine - they only had to be kept alive for work. You can mill or drill or bake with three teeth just as good as with 32 teeth. And if you die, there are more slaves to step up to your machine and continue milling, drilling or baking.
Any escapee from *that* society truly appreciates the western system of medicin
That's funny, I ran the numbers through my rationally thinking computer and it deemed *all* humans extraneous on this planet because it turns out that this planet operates just fine (well, even better) without any humans at all
There are several flaws in this reasoning. First, a computer can be programmed to take care of humans. Second, humans are the only organisms on this planet that are capable of very wide range of physical work. A computer, all alone on a planet, may be unable to maintain itself.
Of course humans are not computers. Ideally, I'd wish everyone to have everything (including healthcare.) The only problem is that humankind doesn't have enough resources for that, even if every worker surrenders all his money into the global pool of healthcare. That is impossible, of course, because the worker also needs to eat, to have housing, to have children, to have a vacation now and then... this already puts a US worker into a balance that is very close to turning red.
The idea of confiscation of nearly all gains from workers and using them, in part, for free healthcare was the way of life in USSR. This bought universal poverty and substandard healthcare. Why to buy the best if ancient equipment, substandard drugs, and idiots as doctors also fit the bill? I am well acquainted with free healthcare, and I don't wish it upon anyone. As they joked in USSR, "the treatment is free only if you do not care about the outcome."
No; I value people who work over those who do not. Though, as I mentioned, some people are forced to not work because they cannot find work.
You think a person's contribution to society is directly proportional to disposable income (Miley Cyrus > Van Gogh)
I am not sure who Miley Cyrus is. From the context I gather that person has a lot of cash and does not work. Well, not working makes him/her/it less valuable than Van Gogh. However, how do we measure contributions to the society that we make? By using money. It's not perfect, but it's better than nothing. Alternatives (like wise men who judge you worthy or not) are even worse.
You would rather keep someone alive who inherited vast quantities of wealth (and does nothing) vs. someone who started with nothing and now has a job cleaning floors
I would value higher someone who works. Money is just a crude measure of person's worth - and in case of inherited wealth that measure breaks down horribly. What to do?
You don't like people who clean floors
??? What could possibly lead you to that conclusion? Those people do work; and while their work is not valued as highly as being a CEO of a Fortune 100 company, it brings bread to the table. It's an honest work. If you don't like cleaning floors, you can always study and seek work on a higher level.
You want your pizzas served by people with diseases
At those prices that I pay for pizza they can afford better doctors than I can:-)
You are certainly right that inheritance throws a large monkey wrench into the valuation scheme. Again, my question is only how to make it all work. As things are, Obamacare is set up in about the same way as a highway robber who stops your stagecoach and asks for a small contribution toward the needy. It doesn't matter if you can afford it or not, by the way. If you are not poor yet, you will be after you buy your Obamacare insurance. I have a philosophical objection to the government who comes to my home, puts a gun to my head, and demands money "for the good of the humanity." For that audacity I will make sure that they get nothing out of me this way.
Nazis killed their insane patients; that campaign preceded the rounding up and killing of Jews.
My view of the problem comes from purely financial side. Consider the following: (1) Healthcare costs money, and (2) you do not have money. You can have only two solutions: (a) you don't get healthcare, or (b) you do get healthcare, but someone else pays for you.
The (b) is traditionally reserved to those who the state officially considers to be unable to work. Those would be children, and adults with injuries or illnesses. They get healthcare for free, since it is customary for humans to help those who are truly in need.
But today (b) is expanded to cover not only injured veterans and wheelchair-bound patients, but just anyone who earns less than you do.
The (a) was the only game in town for millennia. No money = no treatment. Only as societies became richer they became able to afford some healthcare to those who do not pay. But costs of healthcare are rising fast - because the baseline quality of healthcare is rising, and because regulations and insurance consume a large chunk of doctor's income. The US society, on top of that, is not as rich as one would think. The US government has some debt, around 16 trillion dollars. There is no surplus money to treat poor people. (Plenty of those people are poor because of government's policies.) There is not much money in hands of the middle class either, because the middle class is being exterminated. So where would the money come from? Obamacare increases costs for every paying participant because there are too many participants who cannot pay. This will deny healthcare to some of those people who earned it, and will provide healthcare to some people who haven't earned it. Is that fair?
Unless, of course you suffer a catastrophic illness or injury.
I have enough to pay up to the worth of my life. After that it's a losing proposition. What if you need 1 million dollars per month to keep you alive? What about 10 million dollars? Where do you draw the line? Should the entire planet work for you? I guess not. I have enough to take care of what I need. If I run out of money, it's too much. Nobody lives forever, after all.
Few people can afford a $500K medical bill yet society has chosen not to let people die even if they can't afford medical treatment. What's your solution for treating expensive illnesses for the uninsured?
People who need insurance (unlike me) but cannot purchase one are on their own. The society does not owe them anything. You should be asking why those people cannot earn enough money. That would be a far more valid question. Focusing only on food and healthcare only creates a class of permanent dependents who demand from you but deliver nothing in return.
Let the seriously ill continue to be covered by hospitals and government?
Those monies come from working man's pockets, one way or another. The government has only what taxpayers give it. The hospital only has what other patients pay. If a hospital admits a non-paying patient, someone else will pay for his treatment. There are no miracles, and you will have to rob Peter to pay Paul. Healthcare always translates to labor of people - of those who drill for oil, of those who make drugs, of those who make tools, and of those who apply all that to your body. This work needs to be compensated, unless someone proposes that doctors should work for free, and receive all the tools for free from those chemists and steelmakers. There is no fair way for a poor patient to consume thousands of man-hours of highly skilled labor without incurring debt to those people.
Or just let them die (or euthanize them if they can afford to pay for the euthanasia).
Purely mathematically, if you want the medical profession to be sustainable (such as with a balanced budget) then you have to pay the doctors. Obamacare's method is to rob the young to give to the old. I do not approve that. The best option, IMO, was in use until now - societies of mutual insurance, where, if you wanted, you could join at the level that you can afford, and which would return you your own premiums (on average) when you need them. If you contribute little, you will get accordingly. It may pay for fixing a broken arm, but won't be enough to fix a broken heart. Too bad? Yes. But you haven't contributed enough toward the needs of the society, so the society has no reason to contribute toward your needs. Money is used as a measure of those needs that you fulfull. A pizza will cost you 15 tokens; but if you take a broom and clean the floor in pizzeria, the owner will pay you 15 tokens.
So, to answer your question: if an adult person hasn't contributed anything to the society when he had a chance... yes, he should die. He made his choice when he decided to not work. (*) He chose poorly.
(*) It is getting fuzzier today - some people cannot find jobs, even though they want them. A rationally thinking computer would sentence those people to death anyway because they are, clearly, extraneous on this planet. Humans are a little slower with pulling the trigger; but still, nobody is entitled to the labor of others just because he needs that labor to survive. Let's say, I don't want to spend my own money on food - will you be paying for my food? If you don't, I will die!!!1! Should I expect a check from you? No? Why so? Because I could find other income? But an otherwise sane homeless person, who needs healthcare, also has other options. He just chooses to not exercise them. Tens of thousands of illegals from Mexico are standing by the doors of Home Depot, waiting for someone to pick them up to do some manual work. It's a good example. There are many ditches to be dug, and many fence posts to be instal
They could instantly cut the website demand by 90% by dividing enrollments up by the last digit of the SSN of the primary enrollee.
There aren't enough people as it is to pay double and triple for health plans that they don't need. I, personally, have no desire to even visit "that website," whatever URL it may have. I can pay for my own healthcare without involvement of moneychangers.
I've always been somewhat surprised by how (relatively) few vendors of fancy smartphones don't have a "My employer is paranoid, I'll give you $100 extra to leave out the phone module during assembly." build-to-order option.
Because then the phone cannot be used for making or receiving phone calls.
Fear not, nobody is going to click to RTFA. Slashdot's readers don't need to read someone's opinion (that is also wrong, of course.) Every reader has his own opinion. Slashdot's value is in discussion on a given subject. If the subject is sufficiently presented in the summary, that's all that is needed for a lively debate.
Slashdot Mirror
Delivery of physical documents remains a vital service for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that many people do not have computers.
So why should people with computers subsidize people without computers? Or, if we do, wouldn't it be easier to just buy them an Obamaphone, or a cheap computer? If they need to print, can't they do it somewhere like Kinko's or a library? (I seldom need to print anything.)
Admit it, delivery of physical pieces of paper - who usually have no particular worth - burns a lot of fuel, and requires a lot of human labor. It just doesn't make sense today. But if you live somewhere far, far away - so far that even the satellite Internet is not an option - then perhaps you need to sign up for USPS delivery, and pay for it as you pay for any other service. USPS will print your email, securely, put it in an envelope, and will deliver that envelope to you. Will that make the recipient happy?
Not everyone has a computer or can afford an internet connection nor should they be expected to do so. Perhaps many years down the line electronic delivery of documents will become ubiquitous and computers will become sufficiently cheap but that time will probably require another generation or two to die off before it happens.
What year have you arrived from, 1910? A computer today can be purchased under $100 - this is less than I usually leave in a single grocery store. How much lower do you want the price to go? If you cannot afford the free WiFi connection in your city, there are free hotspots. I do not advocate cell phone connections, they are overpriced; I don't have one myself. But a generic Internet link can be had for very little - and it can be shared among tens of families, if they are so poor. Just tell them the WiFi password, or run it open. Is $2-3/mo too much?
There is absolutely no reason why access to a computer cannot be expected. Car ownership is often expected - and that is far harder to accomplish. Anyone can own, or share, a computer. Anyone can own a free email address. It cannot possibly hurt anyone to check his email once a week. Paper mail, like horses, and like open fire, and like hunting for food, should be left to special cases - to enthusiasts, or to professionals, or to businesses that need the paper and that are willing to pay for it. A common man has no use of that paper, and it ends up in trash. Why are we, as a society, so enthusiastic about mail? It is insecure, it is unreliable, and it is slow.
I'm sure the CEOs will just love living in China!
CEOs don't have to live in China. Besides, San Jose looks like a medieval village, compared to Shanghai.
Just look at how businesses haven't fled California!
Hmm... I'm here, and I know examples to the contrary. New businesses are not hiring.
Your second option would get the 1% beheaded, just like in France. As it should be.
Perhaps. As I said, it's a risky proposition. But if you don't accept any of those two plans, what do you propose? As it stands, most of US goods cannot be sold on the international market (they aren't even produced.) This is not a sustainable situation. Feds are printing money like crazy, but that cannot continue forever. What is your prognosis for, say, next 10 years?
Don't be surprised when the serfs storm the castle one day. The behavior is abusive and will only be tolerated so long and to a limited degree. Note that storming the castle could mean forcing employment laws similar to France.
This will simply result in no new hiring in the USA. Companies are already overtaxed; right now they are additionally struck with healthcare requirements. Any employer of sufficient size will do well - from his business' point of view - if he just moves the whole company to China. Or, if he can't, he will automate his process as much as possible and outsource all the rest. In the end, you cannot make a law that requires companies to stay in business.
The US worker is already extremely expensive on the global pay scale. If you make him even more expensive, fewer of them will be hired. If you want to compete with China and bring industries back, you have to either set up prohibitive tariffs, so that Chinese goods are as expensive here as domestic ones, or to drop the minimum salary to Chinese levels, along with OSHA and EPA and many other things. For the first one the USA will be ejected from WTO; besides, US goods, still expensive, won't be competitive on the world market. The second option has no such drawbacks, but it's very dangerous and hard to do correctly. Those incompetents can't even handle healthcare; here we are talking about fundamentally realigning the USA to fit into the new, global system of manufacturing.
The best way for employers here to avoid that is to demonstrate that it isn't necessary.
Iti s not necessary, but at the same time employers feel no pressure whatsoever to change their hiring methods. They already can assign negative weight to women because women are more likely to need personal time. But you cannot ever prove that. Today they don't even say why someone is rejected, to minimize the liability.
The behavior of feudal lords and HR people is caused by the same reason: mistrust. And they are not entirely wrong here. Many people - just as you are saying - are good, honest workers who always separate their work and their free time. But "many" is not a specific number. IMO, not more than 25% of all workers are inclined to maintain such separation. Some of them do not want; some cannot; some do not care; some are interested to work as little as possible. The majority of workers allow some leakage of their off the clock habits into their on the clock activities. Employers do not object to some of that, but abuse of trust is not a well defined line in the sand. Given the choice, HR picks employees who are less likely to become a liability. You can claim all you want that on weekends you are a completely different person than on weekdays, but nobody is going to spend time on evaluating your statements - unless you are a unique employee who has unique skills. Many programmers are like that, but very few accountants or pizza delivery people are.
Besides, as I said in my example, if you are doing your daredevil stunts on weekends, it does not matter how honest you are if you are in a hospital with 123 broken bones, unable to complete that complex project where you are the leader. The same will happen if you get arrested, or lost in the woods, or sick - those are objective factors that do not depend on your intent. I knew people who got injured in a game of hockey and had to spend some days away from work. You would say that this is normal behavior and normal accidents that all people have from time to time, and that is true. However this does not prevent HR from selecting only those applicants who present below the average risk. After all, this is the primary function of HR - to evaluate applicants and to select only those who are the best for the company. This does lead to rejection of normal behavior; but what can anyone do about that?
I'd like to hear what the reasons are for those that agree with using social networks and information found on the internet when hiring. I might be wrong or missing something.
You would be perfectly correct if a human can wear one mind at work, and then wear another mind after work.
But humans are not robots, and it doesn't work this way. If you possess a characteristic away from work, you will have some of it at work, or close enough to work that it matters. HR will decide on their own if those characteristics are a concern or not. If you are engaged in risky entertainment, for example, you are a risk to the company at least because you can be injured or killed - and who will be doing your work then? There are several things that , combined, form the "company culture" - and if you do not fit that culture, too bad. For example, a company who employs primarily religious people (I worked for one, briefly) will not want to hire a militant atheist. There is simply no reason to take chances when so many people are out of work. Exceptions may be made only for employees who are special in what they do.
But the risk of battery puncture and fire doesn't get worse as the Tesla ages
Why do you think so? LI-Ion batteries experience significant mechanical deformation as they are charged/discharged. There is a lot of vibration that is transferred into the battery from the road. Old batteries require longer charging, at higher temperatures. The numbers will not be the same.
There is yet another issue. Batteries are essentially strips of plastic tape that have goo smeared onto them, and then the strips are rolled up to form an element. There is not much accuracy in this process, and not much repeatability. Some batteries may serve longer than expected, and some may fail prematurely. Some failures can cause fires. A gas tank is a precision instrument, compared to a battery. It can be inspected for leaks, but a battery cannot be inspected in a similar way - there are too many sealed elements, and each of them is manufactured by the lowest bidder. We haven't seen yet battery fires in Teslas that are caused by an intact battery. But as more cars are put onto the road, and as they accumulate more miles, this may become an issue.
A Yagi will not work inside of a waveguide for a million reasons, starting with the fact that there is no flat wavefront to speak of. Yagi antenna works on the principle that individual elements are hit with the flat wave at a slightly different time, which translates to a phase shift at a given frequency. If you build the antenna just right, these phase shifts are mutually neutralized, but only if the wave comes from there, and on a certain the frequency. Then the signals from multiple elements can be combined (Yagi does that in space; phased arrays do it primarily in hardware) and you get higher gain.
A wave in the waveguide is very well defined by known boundary conditions; this allows you to design transitions that do exactly what you need - they can be probes, loops, or whatever the design requires.
What you are looking at in the picture is the waveguide they used to test it. The antenna itself is inside the waveguide
The antenna, in this case, is the open end of the waveguide that interfaces with the external EM field. For example, a horn can have a larger aperture, but at the end of it there is only a small probe. It would be incorrect to call the probe "the antenna."
Or you can say it in a different way. An antenna here is anything that cannot be thrown out without hurting the performance. For example, the stack of books that the antenna sits on is not an antenna. A dish in the DirectTV antenna is part of the antenna because the thing won't work without it.
The laws of physics that determine how much energy you can capture from the spherical wavefront are very well known. (At that level it's pure geometry.) The OP is correct: there is only that much energy going through that given surface. You cannot recover more.
A common man who cares about being able to remember an inkblot later on would describe it with specifics, like "five blue on top and three blue on bottom." This is quite parseable by a computer. The associative descriptions that the authors are hoping for are just not going to happen. Never. An association is a fleeting thing, especially when you are dealing with a random inkblot.
Far more importantly, the inconvenience of matching those images will be so great that the web sites will lose audience, and the site owner will drop this stupidity.
Most importantly, the method does not protect the customer - it only protects the web site owner. (A hacker can always figure out, with patience and time, which description fits what inkblot.) This means that millions of customers will be forced to endure this torture just for convenience of the site operator. This isn't going to fare well.
I dare them to find enough commercial web sites who are willing to show such a finger to their paying audience. They would be far better off generating realistic "oil on canvas" images in impressionist style.
It's the design and quality of assembly that are being compared here. Most cars move front end forward, and the gas tank is the last part that gets affected (and if it does, the impact was too strong.) Tesla's batteries are located closer to the middle of the car, and much closer to the road, so they are less protected - despite the steel box around them. Is that enough? Maybe; or maybe not. Losing a $60-80K car in a fire just because you ran over a brick on the road is not a very pleasant proposition even if you are a millionaire. Standard (ICE) cars will not be totaled from that; you may need to tow the car and replace a few lids and covers, but after that the car would be driveable.
The comparison would be valid only among the new cars (< 1 year.) Old cars have different problems, and Tesla model S is not yet old enough for comparison (we don't know how safe it is after 3, 5 and 10 years on the road.)
> They could 'trip' and fall into each other (faking...)
Nah, I tried that at work with a secretary and got into even worse trouble.
She married you, I gather? :-)
Uh... no. DOS was pretty bad, even in it's day.
MS DOS + Norton Commander = a solution that was faster than most modern file managers.
Windows 95 was inferior to most of its contemporaries (e.g., OS 2)
OS/2 was just a bad product. I used it. Perhaps the kernel had its positive sides, being true 32-bit and all, but overall the OS was nearly unusable. Start with selection of ugliest fonts on the planet, then move to the selection of ugly widgets, then address the programming model... there was hardly anything inspiring in the OS/2. Windows was far lighter - and though it crashed a lot until NT, it was faster when it worked.
Bob has 5 apples. Bob eats 2 apples and loses 1. How many apples does he have left?
Presuming there is only one Bob, at least two.
Assuming that the list of operations that were performed upon his set of apples is completely listed. But we do not know that. Bob could have eaten two apples, lost one, and in addition have one apple stolen from him - or three more added by his loving grandmother who notices that Bob is running low.
This is why such questions are so hard for math-oriented people. They instantly see loose ends and loopholes.
This is exactly true. A logically and mathematically oriented mind will come up with correct answers that are not in the list, only because the author of the test intended it for simpler minds, those who readily discard less obvious factors - like the cup itself.
They go on tangent because the question masquerades as a valid, mathematically correct system of equations - which already confuses anyone who heard about such things because those equations are not true. Whereas in reality the question has nothing to do with math, and can be just as easily asked with flowers or animals.
Perhaps this example would be more convincing if it's not your brother who is sick, but a random person from another city who you do not know, and who does not know you, nor cares about you.
Will you gracefully accept a stranger for 6 months and pay for all his needs? Will you not ask for compensation from that stranger? Even if you do it once, what if after this one checks out another one is already ringing your doorbell, for another 6 months of stay? How soon will you give up?
Obamacare requires you to pay for other people who you do not know, regardless of your own desires. Are you a free man after that? Is this the land of the free, or it's a slave ranch where every slave must obey the master?
Your example of compassion is expandable to private insurances - which is financing of other people's needs. You used to be able to buy any coverage that you need, or none. Now you must choose from three preset levels, none of which are very interesting. What advantage can you have from having a bureaucrat assemble a healthcare plan for you? Do they know your needs better than you do?
A private insurance is the same well known managed fund; everyone contributes, and everyone may draw upon it as needed. It used to be your choice what plan to join - and that would be indicative of the group of people that you choose to join. The plan for heavy smokers will be more expensive than for nonsmokers - but it's fair because smokers are more likely to need treatment. I do not smoke; why should I pay for someone else's vices? I may be willing to share the risk with people just like myself. That would be fair enough. The new plans make such separation impossible. People with healthy habits are expected to pay for treatment of people with bad habits. Where is my freedom of association?
Can you give an example of "nearly all gains"?
For example, an accountant may earn 120 roubles per month. Rent would be 30 roubles, food would be 60 roubles, and family would consume 30 roubles. How soon will such a person be able to afford a car (6,000 roubles) ?
In USSR people were paid only the bare minimum to rent a room or a whole apartment from the government; to buy basic food in government-owned stores, and sometimes a TV (300 roubles) or a radio receiver (100 roubles) from the same store. They were not expected to have any excess money; many had to borrow several days before the payday. It took decades to outfit an apartment, assuming honest work.
People in USSR were nothing but slaves; however the government permitted them to pick and choose what they do, as long as they work somewhere (not working was a crime.) The government did not care where they live, and how many people (none or one) can fit into their kitchen. Slaves were permitted to play around with those trifles. A whole workday of a scientist was valued in 7 roubles - enough to buy a couple of bags of raw potatoes, or twice as much as cost of eating at a diner. Slaves were provided with transportation that was nearly free (0.05 rouble per ride) - but it was very uncomfortable. Taxicabs were available, sometimes, starting from 10 roubles.
This paints a picture of a very poor society. This is because the government retained nearly all the profit from the labor of those people. Some work was poorly organized and not efficient, but still people worked practically for free - because it was the only game in town, and you could not refuse to participate. The rest of the monies was spent on stupid things, like helping select African regimes. Millions of tons of trucks, weapons and fuel were readily sent to any tinpot dictator who declares himself a socialist (of convenience.) A lot of money was spent on weapons, and on spaceflight, and on personal enrichment of party leaders.
What was not spent money on? Housing, and healthcare. Those were two lagging areas of social development. People in 1980s still lived in homes built in 1880s - and those were not Czar's palaces either. Those houses were nearly impossible to live in, everything was worn down so much in them that many did not even have central hot water pipes connected; crude point of use water heaters were employed instead. Any living accomodations were hard to get. The Party simply did not care that the people live in squalor, like five people in one tiny room. (The bathroom was shared, of course, between all the inhabitants of an apartment when it is divided up this way. And the telephone.)
Healthcare was similarly rationed. Shortage of doctors was a permanent state of affairs. Doctors were paid very little, and in return they were often angry and hating the patient even before he walks in. The equipment that they used was from 1950s and 1960s. Dental fillings were done without anaesthetic, without suction, without a nurse, and using an old, belt-driven dental drill. No X-rays either. There are many horror stories on the Internet that explain how the whole torture was set up. Imported, modern dental drills, and anaesthetics, and nurses, and X-rays, and the latest materials - that was available only to patients at the Kremlin Hospital and a few top notch, closed hospitals that only serviced party bosses. Everyone else had to suffer without anaesthetic. Naturally, the "free" did not involve a dental hygienist - there was no such job, and nobody even knew that you need to see one a couple times per year. Slaves did not require good medicine - they only had to be kept alive for work. You can mill or drill or bake with three teeth just as good as with 32 teeth. And if you die, there are more slaves to step up to your machine and continue milling, drilling or baking.
Any escapee from *that* society truly appreciates the western system of medicin
That's funny, I ran the numbers through my rationally thinking computer and it deemed *all* humans extraneous on this planet because it turns out that this planet operates just fine (well, even better) without any humans at all
There are several flaws in this reasoning. First, a computer can be programmed to take care of humans. Second, humans are the only organisms on this planet that are capable of very wide range of physical work. A computer, all alone on a planet, may be unable to maintain itself.
Of course humans are not computers. Ideally, I'd wish everyone to have everything (including healthcare.) The only problem is that humankind doesn't have enough resources for that, even if every worker surrenders all his money into the global pool of healthcare. That is impossible, of course, because the worker also needs to eat, to have housing, to have children, to have a vacation now and then... this already puts a US worker into a balance that is very close to turning red.
The idea of confiscation of nearly all gains from workers and using them, in part, for free healthcare was the way of life in USSR. This bought universal poverty and substandard healthcare. Why to buy the best if ancient equipment, substandard drugs, and idiots as doctors also fit the bill? I am well acquainted with free healthcare, and I don't wish it upon anyone. As they joked in USSR, "the treatment is free only if you do not care about the outcome."
You value people with wealth over those that work
No; I value people who work over those who do not. Though, as I mentioned, some people are forced to not work because they cannot find work.
You think a person's contribution to society is directly proportional to disposable income (Miley Cyrus > Van Gogh)
I am not sure who Miley Cyrus is. From the context I gather that person has a lot of cash and does not work. Well, not working makes him/her/it less valuable than Van Gogh. However, how do we measure contributions to the society that we make? By using money. It's not perfect, but it's better than nothing. Alternatives (like wise men who judge you worthy or not) are even worse.
You would rather keep someone alive who inherited vast quantities of wealth (and does nothing) vs. someone who started with nothing and now has a job cleaning floors
I would value higher someone who works. Money is just a crude measure of person's worth - and in case of inherited wealth that measure breaks down horribly. What to do?
You don't like people who clean floors
??? What could possibly lead you to that conclusion? Those people do work; and while their work is not valued as highly as being a CEO of a Fortune 100 company, it brings bread to the table. It's an honest work. If you don't like cleaning floors, you can always study and seek work on a higher level.
You want your pizzas served by people with diseases
At those prices that I pay for pizza they can afford better doctors than I can :-)
You are certainly right that inheritance throws a large monkey wrench into the valuation scheme. Again, my question is only how to make it all work. As things are, Obamacare is set up in about the same way as a highway robber who stops your stagecoach and asks for a small contribution toward the needy. It doesn't matter if you can afford it or not, by the way. If you are not poor yet, you will be after you buy your Obamacare insurance. I have a philosophical objection to the government who comes to my home, puts a gun to my head, and demands money "for the good of the humanity." For that audacity I will make sure that they get nothing out of me this way.
Nazis killed their insane patients; that campaign preceded the rounding up and killing of Jews.
My view of the problem comes from purely financial side. Consider the following: (1) Healthcare costs money, and (2) you do not have money. You can have only two solutions: (a) you don't get healthcare, or (b) you do get healthcare, but someone else pays for you.
The (b) is traditionally reserved to those who the state officially considers to be unable to work. Those would be children, and adults with injuries or illnesses. They get healthcare for free, since it is customary for humans to help those who are truly in need.
But today (b) is expanded to cover not only injured veterans and wheelchair-bound patients, but just anyone who earns less than you do.
The (a) was the only game in town for millennia. No money = no treatment. Only as societies became richer they became able to afford some healthcare to those who do not pay. But costs of healthcare are rising fast - because the baseline quality of healthcare is rising, and because regulations and insurance consume a large chunk of doctor's income. The US society, on top of that, is not as rich as one would think. The US government has some debt, around 16 trillion dollars. There is no surplus money to treat poor people. (Plenty of those people are poor because of government's policies.) There is not much money in hands of the middle class either, because the middle class is being exterminated. So where would the money come from? Obamacare increases costs for every paying participant because there are too many participants who cannot pay. This will deny healthcare to some of those people who earned it, and will provide healthcare to some people who haven't earned it. Is that fair?
Unless, of course you suffer a catastrophic illness or injury.
I have enough to pay up to the worth of my life. After that it's a losing proposition. What if you need 1 million dollars per month to keep you alive? What about 10 million dollars? Where do you draw the line? Should the entire planet work for you? I guess not. I have enough to take care of what I need. If I run out of money, it's too much. Nobody lives forever, after all.
Few people can afford a $500K medical bill yet society has chosen not to let people die even if they can't afford medical treatment. What's your solution for treating expensive illnesses for the uninsured?
People who need insurance (unlike me) but cannot purchase one are on their own. The society does not owe them anything. You should be asking why those people cannot earn enough money. That would be a far more valid question. Focusing only on food and healthcare only creates a class of permanent dependents who demand from you but deliver nothing in return.
Let the seriously ill continue to be covered by hospitals and government?
Those monies come from working man's pockets, one way or another. The government has only what taxpayers give it. The hospital only has what other patients pay. If a hospital admits a non-paying patient, someone else will pay for his treatment. There are no miracles, and you will have to rob Peter to pay Paul. Healthcare always translates to labor of people - of those who drill for oil, of those who make drugs, of those who make tools, and of those who apply all that to your body. This work needs to be compensated, unless someone proposes that doctors should work for free, and receive all the tools for free from those chemists and steelmakers. There is no fair way for a poor patient to consume thousands of man-hours of highly skilled labor without incurring debt to those people.
Or just let them die (or euthanize them if they can afford to pay for the euthanasia).
Purely mathematically, if you want the medical profession to be sustainable (such as with a balanced budget) then you have to pay the doctors. Obamacare's method is to rob the young to give to the old. I do not approve that. The best option, IMO, was in use until now - societies of mutual insurance, where, if you wanted, you could join at the level that you can afford, and which would return you your own premiums (on average) when you need them. If you contribute little, you will get accordingly. It may pay for fixing a broken arm, but won't be enough to fix a broken heart. Too bad? Yes. But you haven't contributed enough toward the needs of the society, so the society has no reason to contribute toward your needs. Money is used as a measure of those needs that you fulfull. A pizza will cost you 15 tokens; but if you take a broom and clean the floor in pizzeria, the owner will pay you 15 tokens.
So, to answer your question: if an adult person hasn't contributed anything to the society when he had a chance... yes, he should die. He made his choice when he decided to not work. (*) He chose poorly.
(*) It is getting fuzzier today - some people cannot find jobs, even though they want them. A rationally thinking computer would sentence those people to death anyway because they are, clearly, extraneous on this planet. Humans are a little slower with pulling the trigger; but still, nobody is entitled to the labor of others just because he needs that labor to survive. Let's say, I don't want to spend my own money on food - will you be paying for my food? If you don't, I will die!!!1! Should I expect a check from you? No? Why so? Because I could find other income? But an otherwise sane homeless person, who needs healthcare, also has other options. He just chooses to not exercise them. Tens of thousands of illegals from Mexico are standing by the doors of Home Depot, waiting for someone to pick them up to do some manual work. It's a good example. There are many ditches to be dug, and many fence posts to be instal
They could instantly cut the website demand by 90% by dividing enrollments up by the last digit of the SSN of the primary enrollee.
There aren't enough people as it is to pay double and triple for health plans that they don't need. I, personally, have no desire to even visit "that website," whatever URL it may have. I can pay for my own healthcare without involvement of moneychangers.
I've always been somewhat surprised by how (relatively) few vendors of fancy smartphones don't have a "My employer is paranoid, I'll give you $100 extra to leave out the phone module during assembly." build-to-order option.
Because then the phone cannot be used for making or receiving phone calls.
Fear not, nobody is going to click to RTFA. Slashdot's readers don't need to read someone's opinion (that is also wrong, of course.) Every reader has his own opinion. Slashdot's value is in discussion on a given subject. If the subject is sufficiently presented in the summary, that's all that is needed for a lively debate.